Today, I have good news and I have bad news.
The good news is that I was feeling like I was using my Sweetwater pint glasses too frequently, and for my own satisfaction of variety, I wanted to mix things up. I have a bunch of other glasses in another cabinet, so I went to swap out some of the Sweetwater pints that I’ve felt were being repeated too much. In doing so, I unearthed the absolute best, most appropriate glass that I should have been using throughout this entire journey, but simply neglected to remember that I had it.
This baby das boot easily holds 16 ounces, which makes it perfect in the sense that I can pour each day’s entire can into it without having to reload later on. Plus it has that whole German tradition of drinking out of a boot thing going on, which is why this would’ve been perfect had I been using it from the start, but I just forgot about it. At least for the final four days, I can make sure to be drinking my German biers from my German boot.
The bad news is that on the day in which I can start using my boot, the beer of the day is an IPA. After twenty days, I was beginning to wonder if Deutschland even did IPAs since I hadn’t encountered any after this long, and I was quite satisfied with that assessment too. Unfortunately, like a turd in the pool, an IPA decided to float to the surface, on day #21.
In addition, it’s also another encore from a particular brewer, since beer #9 was also from the same company, as indicative of the can design featuring an image of a woman presumably drowning outside of a porthole because I can’t think of any other scenario where another human being would be visible outside of a porthole, unless they were scuba diving or drowning, and the woman isn’t wearing any scuba gear nor does she have a fin which would make her an underwater breathing mermaid.
But yeah, it’s an IPA, and I winced like OJ Simpson in court when I discovered this. Regardless, I made it this far drinking every drop of every beer, and there’s no point in throwing in the towel now, even if there was a shitty IPA in my path. I poured it into my boot, disappointed that this would be the first thing to use my boot on, but hoping that the Germans do an IPA better than all the shitty ‘Murican hipsters who release a litany of shitty signature IPAs.
To the credit of Perlenzauber, or whatever the brewery is called, as far as IPAs go, this wasn’t turrible. It actually had a fairly decent initial flavor, that staved off the vast majority of the bitter piss flavor at the end of most other IPAs, and I actually found it to be remotely drinkable as far as IPAs were concerned. That is, as long as the beer were at its coldest. As the time clicked away as mythical wife and I were catching up on The Mandalorian, as the beer got warmer, the more it turned back into IPA piss water, and by the time I got to the bottom of the boot, and the bubble had popped, I was struggling to finish it, and just kind of bottoms upped it, just to finish the job.
In spite of the not-quite negative first impressions, it’s still an IPA at the end of the day, and I simply don’t favor them. The fact that it’s not dead last is a credit to the initial flavor notes that I did like, and makes me really try and remember just how bad the three underneath it really were to have been denigrated as worse than an IPA.
The funniest thing to me is that in spite of the fact that I didn’t hate this completely, the snobs at BeerAdvocate apparently have hated the shit out of this beer, in as equally new to them taste tests. Clearly, my rubric for beer preferences are way off of the masses on the internet, but whatever.
Hopefully, tomorrow is back to another lager, or better yet another dunkel to pour into my boot, because today really was kind of a mulligan, and I’m hoping that the final three beers will be some good ones to close out this magical boozy journey with.
Current Rankings:
- Jubilation Suds (#18)
- Bären Weisse (#16)
- First Coral (#2)
- Kirta (#5)
- Turbo Prop (#6)
- Schwarze Tinte (#13)
- Perlenzauber (#9)
- Loncium Vienna Style Lager (#12)
- Märzenbier (#20)
- Jubiläumsbier 333 (#7)
- Zwönitzer Steinbier (#4)
- Alpen Stoff (#17)
- Erl Hell (#19)
- Grandl (#11)
- Altbairisch Hell (#15)
- Hell (#1)
- Tannen Hell (#8)
- Perlenzauber IPA (#21)
- Tradition (#10)
- Hallertauer Hopfen-Cuvee (#14)
- Käuzle (#3)
I’m in a pleasant mood. I’ve been doing some redecorating to my office since I’m in there for the vast majority of my work weeks, and I’ve been identifying lots of things that I think could use some reorganization. Things have worked out close to how I was envisioning them, and I’m feeling pretty good about the work I’ve put in, and I’m like 90% of the way done.
When I pulled this bier out of the fridge, my first thought was “Herrnbräu? Wasn’t there already a Herrnbräu beer already?” To which the answer was yes, as bier #10 was also a Herrnbräu product, Tradition. It did not rank well on my rankings, and it was kind of like the Miller High Life of Germany; as in the cheap, easily drinkable beer that you drink after you’ve got your buzz going and you want to keep it going. It wasn’t terrible, but at the same time, it was entirely forgettable. If I didn’t write about it, I wouldn’t have been remotely close to recalling anything about it.
I’m not a fan of IPAs. They’re bitter, they taste like piss, and it’s obnoxious that every microbrew and craft beer maker in the country makes their name off of some signature IPA. Every home brewer seems to make an IPA, and from what I understand, it’s mostly because IPAs are some of the easiest beers to manufacture, which is why everyone who makes beer always tries to put their own twist on an IPA, when to people like me they’re all basically 
When I was but a n00b to drinking, one of the very first things that I really took a liking to was wheat beers. Hefeweizens. It started with the hefeweizens at Ellis Island Casino in Las Vegas, one of my favorite places on the planet, and it didn’t hurt that they were free, plentiful, and served by a super cougar of a waitress, as long as I was continuing to piss away cash at $5 blackjack or playing Mermaid’s Gold penny slots.
Does “hell” mean something in Deutsch than it does in English? Because this is literally the third “hell” bier that I’ve come across over the last 15 days, and I can’t imagine that there’s such a fascination with the unholy underworld that there’d be this many beers named after it in the first place. A cursory Google translate shows that the word “héll” in Deutsch means “bright,” and I’m wondering if all these hell beers are referring to the fact that they’ve all been fairly light in color, and not that these are biers suited for the dark afterlives in actual, fire and brimstone, devil with a pitchfork, hell-hell, despite the fact that all of them seemed to have been missing the accent mark over the E.